Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "TheDC Shorts" channel.

During the time of the Revolutionary War and the later ratification of the Constitution, the most common privately owned firearms were rifles, or accurate dueling pistols, not smoothbore muskets. Muskets were useless for hunting. Muskets were preferred for armies because of their superior rate of fire, but many US combatants, particularly the militia, had to fight with rifles because that was what they had. Prior to the invention of minie ball ammo, to load a rifle, you had to hammer the lead ball all the way down the length of the barrel through the rifling, whereas with a smoothbore you could force the ball home with one stroke. A musketeer in those days could fire several rounds in took a rifleman to fire two. Essentially the smoothbore musket was the submachine gun of the era. And it WAS possible to hit a man sized target with a cheap smoothbore pistol at short range. John Wilkes Booth used one to shoot Lincoln in the back of the head.
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